Colley Cibber, although appointed as ‘poet laureate’ by the monarch of the day, was not so much a poet as a playwright in 18th century England. Not that his contemporaries regarded him as much of a playwright either. If reports are to be believed, they dismissed his attempts as poor adaptations of more popular plays of the time with Alexander Pope (‘The Rape of the Lock’) being particularly scathing.
His odes in praise of members of the royal household (part of the poet laureate’s duties) on their birthdays were triggers for others to compose parodies of what they deemed were pedestrian original compositions. True, there are aspects to his poetry that could have been improved, but he will always be remembered, if for nothing else, for that solitary piece of creation ‘The Blind Boy’ whose first four lines went thus:
What are the blessings of the sight,
O tell your poor blind boy!
The poem is structured as a blind boy importuning his readers to explain to him the concept of light and blessings of being possessed of vision. For the boy in Cibber’s poem, it is the mystery of light and blessings of vision. For American composer and songwriter Cole Porter, however, it was a query to his stage audience about wanting to know that mysterious thing called love (‘What Is This Thing Called Love’, Cole Porter 1929) which always made a fool of him.
We all have a question
Isaac Asimov sought an answer to the same question (in jest, of course) when he wrote a short story about a bunch of aliens kidnapping a man and a woman to quiz them about human practices of reproduction and, to compound the offence, by wanting the two to give a practical demonstration as well. Every one of us has a question, at some time or the other, for which we desperately seek an answer.
And so it might well be for the present Director of the Central Bureau of investigation (CBI) who wants to know, ‘‘What is this thing called autonomy?’’ Or so it might seem, if his investigations into the coal block allotment scam at the Centre are anything to go by. Unlike the blind boy in Cibber’s poem who did not have sight, the CBI Director does indeed possess autonomy but perhaps doesn’t know he has it.
Indeed, my quibble with the Supreme Court analogy of the CBI being likened to a ‘caged parrot’ is this. It may be a parrot in a cage. However, its wings, far from being clipped, are very much intact and, what is more, the cage door is actually wide ajar instead of being firmly shut.
Take the argument that the CBI Director is hamstrung in his functioning as the head of the investigating agency by some intrusive oversight by the Government. Even if that is true in the general sense, it doesn’t appear to be so in the instant case.
For instance, couldn’t the CBI Director have refused to share details of the ‘status report’ on the ongoing investigation in the coal block allotment scam even if the Law Minister wanted it? If he had refused, the Government couldn’t have done anything about it. After all, what are its options? A transfer, to some other department within the Home Ministry or reversion to the parent State in the IPS cadre? Hardly.
‘No Thank You’
Quite apart from the security of tenure (nearly two full years, in this case) that he enjoys under the Supreme Court judgment in the Vineet Narain case, there is another aspect as well. For the Government to attempt to move him out of the CBI would amount to a clear obstruction of justice in the coal block allotment case whose investigation the Supreme Court was directly overseeing.
The only option left for the Government in the event the CBI Director refused to share the details of the investigation with it, would have been to move the Supreme Court, seeking from it a directive to the CBI to share such details. But then, it would have to convince the Court that the PMO and the Coal Ministry — whose conduct is at the heart of the investigation — are capable of objective evaluation of the work done by the CBI thus far, and offer such suggestions even if it meant implicating themselves further! Even if the Court felt persuaded by the argument that the Government was capable of resolving the conflict of interest inherent in the situation, in all probability, it would have spared the latter of such spiritual agony and said, ‘No thank you’.
Such a ruling would have had the additional merit of not wanting to put an accused (the Government was certainly in the dock on the question) in a position where he would have to testify against himself.
Freedom can’t be absolute
Amidst all the talk of intrusive oversight and the CBI wanting the Government go ahead at every turn for investigating every single act of serious crime, one cannot overlook the display by it, of autonomy in another case.
A case, let it be said, that was every bit as embarrassing to the Government as accusations of malafide in the coal block allotments. Even as the CBI was saying that it cannot do anything without the express sanction of the Government, it went ahead and trapped the nephew of Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal on charges of a conspiracy to subvert the due process of selection to the post of Member, Railway Board!
It is fair to say that the Government couldn’t have countenanced any action by the CBI, if it was really orchestrating its every move in bringing to book the nephew of the Railway Minister.
The potential for public ridicule is so great in public perception that positions of authority in the Government can be secured through clandestine auctions, with the post going to the highest bidder. And what was the authority for the CBI to act in the Railway appointment corruption case? Why, only the duty to uphold the due process of law that every public servant is enjoined upon to observe.
There is this dangerous notion that, while every other public servant can be trusted to exercise authority with responsibility, policemen are inherently incapable of doing so. This is nothing but crass elitist prejudice.
Everybody deserves freedom in the best traditions of the philosophy advocated by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Equally, there is no such thing as absolute freedom, as these philosophers themselves recognised. Kant spoke of freedom of action bound by a certain moral code. In the public sphere, it is freedom circumscribed by checks and balances in administrative law.